German-American Almanacs
In 1731, the first German-American almanac was published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the almanac would thereafter become one of the central items in the German-American family library. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac was gaining popularity with Anglo-Americans. In a pre-Information Age, an almanac provided a guide to every-day life, but they continue to be published up to the present time, and reflect in appearance and content their eighteenth and nineteenth and century forerunners.
According to Robert E. Cazden, German-American almanacs were usually printed in a small quarto format, and “the front cover was often decorated with a large woodcut, frequently an allegorical figure or scene symbolic of American agriculture, commerce, or industry.” The rear cover usually had a multiplication table, or other kinds of information, and inside there “were astronomical and astrological tables, the rising and setting of sun and moon, the time of the tides, weather forecasts, lists of roads and distances, schedules or court sessions, perhaps tables of historical dates, and a wide assortment of practical hints and advice for man and beast.”
All of this, Cazden observes was “interlarded with stories, anecdotes, and articles of general interest. Later in the nineteenth century, children, farmers, and workers were addressed directly by almanac makers. Also popular were the comic, the illustrated, and the medical almanac, this last a vehicle for patent medicine advertisements.”
The first German-American almanac to appear in the Ohio Valley, was printed in Cincinnati: Teutscher Calendar auf 1808, and many were published and marketed in the Greater Cincinnati area, which became one of the major German-American press centers along with St. Louis and Milwaukee. Often overlooked as ephemera and not collected by libraries, almanacs are valuable source of information providing insight into German-American family life.
Don Yoder notes that the basic framework for understanding time was the calendar year “with customs assigned to specific days and seasons, either agricultural, with the progression through the seasons, and the work and customs associated with each period, or ecclesiastical, marking the religious year as it proceeds from festival to festival.” Not surprisingly, the almanac became a basic guidebook throughout the year for the German-American household, and one of the best selections of them can be found in the German-Americana Collection at the University of Cincinnati.